New languages can develop consistent rules of grammar within a single generation of their birth, a study of an Israeli sign language has shown. “We didn't expect to see word order so quickly.” Carol ...

Andrea Lackner's research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund and affiliated with the Centre of Sign Language and Deaf Communication at the Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt, Austria. Most people ...

In the quest for language universals, one of the properties that linguists generally take to be universal is that a substantial portion of the lexical items are produced sequentially by speakers; i.e.

Lydia Callis's "mesmerizing" work during Hurricane Sandy called attention to how facial and body movements are parts of grammar in the visual language. Callis was great, but not because she was so ...